10:10

Was reading around the blogring the other day, as you do, and I came across an interesting post on Honour and Inspiration.

This was the bit that leapt out at me:

Okay, we don’t have a car to get rid of, we never fly, we’re vegetarian and we try to grow as much of our own food as we can in the garden and allotment. We use public transport and cycle and walk. We buy second hand clothes or strictly fair-trade if new. We buy fairly traded tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar, bananas, rice and everything else we can manage to. We buy as much from our local farmer’s market as we can. We don’t buy lots of new ‘stuff’. We have 1 small, old TV and 1 computer which was second-hand. We turn everything off stand-by, have low-energy light-bulbs and try to conserve water. We have a water butt in the back garden. We use only environmentally household cleaners, ditto with the minimal toiletries we use.

Made me think about our life, and how we are doing. I signed up to 10:10 when it launched, but realistically, we are going to struggle to cut down. Given the electricity bill that arrived the other day, we do need to try though!

Let’s see, how do we measure up these days?

We have one car instead of the two we were running up until last year, and that one spends a lot of time sitting on the drive. It’s diesel as well, so hopefully more economical than petrol. Neither of us is commuting to work any more, and most of its outings are related to children’s activities. It does get used to take Small to Beavers, and children to swimming as well as a drive to music these days, but as the weather improves I’m hoping that we will sort out bikes and they will be used for Beavers and swimming, or we’ll go back to walking down to the pool. Atm I don’t feel right about walking down in the cold and the rain with a baby.

I know that around the world and in history, babies are out and about in all kinds of weathers, and without the coats and warm clothes or warm destinations that we take for granted. But does that mean that I should risk soa’s health/ comfort? I don’t think it does. After all around the world (and in history) lots of babies don’t survive. Hm.

Anyway, getting back to the point. The car really doesn’t get used very much any more. One shopping trip a week – and that shop is just a mile away. I’m trying to cut that down to once a fortnight by doing lots of our fresh food shopping even more locally on foot – we have a greengrocer, butcher, and a good coop all within about 5 minutes brisk walk. Using the greengrocer has improved our diet as well – our family challenge to eat two pieces of fruit a day is going well.

Can’t cut out flying – haven’t done it in years!

Diet – we are not vegetarian apart from me. We’re trying to cook more food from scratch, which is working well in terms of less packaging and lower cost, but probably slightly ups our energy consumption in the cooking. I don’t know whether home cooking is more or less efficient in terms of energy use overall? I guess it means the food is only cooked once, whereas ready meals get cooked both in a factory and at home.

I do find all this about cutting down and back very difficult to work out. Which bits really are efficient? Still, can only try to do our best. I’m hoping that we’ll be a bit better in the garden this year – we have a long term plan to plant fruit trees at some stage, but that won’t come to fruition this year. This year I’ll try tomatoes, potatoes, beans and strawberries I think – need to keep it down to a manageable list so that we succeed. Will ask the kids what they want to add to the list though.

Let’s see, clothing. soa is very environmentally friendly – pretty much all her stuff is second or more hand me downs. I haven’t bought anything new for her apart from a swim nappy 🙂 Small does fairly well too, with quite a lot of stuff from my sister’s step offspring. Big is the only one who doesn’t get much in the way of hand me downs as she’s just too big! Even I get some second hand stuff given. And I shop in charity shops as well.

Right, children are agitating for food, so I’ll have to leave this here and maybe revisit the topics later.